Explanatory Style

How great a life you live depends, to a large degree, on how you make sense of your experiences.

Something can happen and one person will experience it completely differently to another person, simply because she has a different explanatory style.

Here’s what I mean:

When something difficult happens [like missing out on a job], a pessimist will tend to think the experience is:

• permanent: I’ll never get a job again
• pervasive: I always mess up job interviews
• personal: they hated me

When that same difficult thing happens to an optimist, she will tend to think the experience is:

• temporary: a great job will come along soon
• specific: I didn’t manage to put my best self forward in that interview
• external: some really qualified people applied for the role

Just being aware of these different ways of thinking can support you to shift your own thought processes and so, positively alter your experiences.